Klint Finley

Klint Finley is a reporter for Wired, an occasional columnist for TechCrunch, and the co-host of the Mindful Cyborgs podcast. He has also contributed to publications such as Boing Boing, Oregon Business, ReadWriteWeb, Disinfo, and Shift.

Latest from Klint Finley

E-mail newsletters are so hot right now.
Some of the best known are by Ann Friedman, Alexis Madrigal, Dan Hon and Rusty Foster. There’s a web ring for e-mail newsletters now, but really the best newsletters are secret. The authors encourage readers to share the subscribe link with other people who might be interested, but request that no one share the subscribe link on social media or… Read More

Daniel Suarez self-published his first novel, Daemon, in 2006. The book and its sequel Freedom chronicled the rise of a botnet that uses self-driving cars to kill humans, crashes the stock market, and creates a new society in its own image. His next novel, Kill Decision, published by Dutton in 2012, was about aerial drones that could decide when to use lethal force independently of any human. Read More

We live in the age of cryptocurrency heists, Chinese moon landings, eco-disasters and electronic cigarettes. Sounds like something out of a cyberpunk novel.
Well, a cyberpunk novel without the brain implants, but don’t worry, those are coming, too. But one big cyberpunk theme that hasn’t come to pass is the rise of mega-corporations — those huge multinational… Read More

This week President Barack Obama rekindled a couple of the Internet’s favorite debates: whether it’s appropriate to take selfies at funerals, and whether everyone should learn to code.
As part of Computer Science Education Week, Obama delivered a YouTube address titled “President Obama calls on every American to learn code.”
“Learning these skills isn’t… Read More

Many of us yearn for a return to one golden age or another. But there’s a community of bloggers taking the idea to an extreme: they want to turn the dial way back to the days before the French Revolution.
Neoreactionaries believe that all the good stuff from the past few centuries come from technology and capitalism, and that democracy and social progress have actually done more harm… Read More

“The purpose of technology is not to confuse the brain but to serve the body,” William S. Burroughs once said in a Nike commercial, of all places. But things haven’t worked out that way, at least not for most of us. Our technologies are designed to maximize shareholder profit, and if that means distracting, confusing or aggregating the end-user, then so be it. Read More

Fake meats have been around for years, but a new crop of Bay Area startups backed by tech investors think they can make meat substitutes good enough to compete with the real deal. The most ambitious project is Rob Rhinehart‘s cheekily named “Soylent,” an attempt to replace food entirely with a liquid shake that has all the protein, fat, carbohydrates and micronutrients you need. Read More

The biggest change I’ve seen in the tech industry in the past decade isn’t social media, cloud computing, big data, consumerization or even mobile. It’s the mainstream acceptance of open source. Even 10 years ago open source was controversial. Back then “open vs. proprietary” arguments would still erupt at meetings and parties. Back then vendors spread FUD about… Read More

The Internet makes it easy to collaborate across borders. But despite the rise of remote work and virtual teams, founders still need to travel for business sometimes. For some, travel practically becomes the job. And while data and capital now flow virtually unrestricted across borders, physical border crossing have gotten no easier. That’s causing headaches for global startups. Read More

Today Neo Technology, makers of the NoSQL graph database Neo4j announced that it has raised a $11 million Series B led by Sunstone Capital with participation from previous investors such as Fidelity Growth Partners Europe and Conor Venture Partners. Read More

Despite the efforts of many different organizers over the years software developers have resisted unionization. The relatively high pay and good working conditions of developers, the stereotype of geeks as loners and the general decline of unions in the U.S. are all commonly cited reasons. But maybe unions are failing in tech because they’re not addressing the real issue: giving… Read More

FastMail is a popular e-mail provider among power users who want to be customers instead of products. But its interface has been stuck in the 90s — until this week when it rolled out a brand new AJAXy UI. And it’s really, well, fast. Read More

Prezi, a popular alternative to Microsoft PowerPoint and other presentation applications, launched a new version of its interface today. The company, which is advised by Jack Dorsey, also announced that it has passed the 15 million user milestone. Read More

Open source business intelligence vendor Pentaho today announced that it has received a $23 million round led by New Enterprise Associates with participation from previous investors Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures and DAG Ventures. This is the company’s 5th round of funding, but it’s being called a series C. This brings the company’s total funding to $55 million. Read More

Last month we wrote about DevelopersAuction, a company that lets startups “bid” on developers who are looking for work. During the first two-week long auction companies made $30 million worth of offers from companies like Quora and Dropbox. Our first story on the company garnered plenty of skepticism in the comments, but the most recent auction hit $78 million worth of bids… Read More

Acquia was founded by Dries Buytaert, the creator of the open source content management system Drupal, to monetize the project offering hosting and support. Today the company launched a beta of a new service called Acquia Media Cloud and released a new version of Drupal Commons, a distribution of Drupal that comes bundled with a set of addons for building community sites. Read More

Today cloud cost management company Cloudyn announced a new free service for calculating costs of Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances. Reserved Instances are sort of like cloud instances that you pay a retainer for: you pay an upfront fee, and can then pay a discounted rate if/when you use them. Read More

Responsa is a tool for adding interactive FAQs (frequently asked questions) to your company website through an embedded widget.
That sounded more like a feature than a business to me — after all, help desk applications like Zendesk and GetSatisfaction already have knowledge management systems for handling FAQs. But founder and CEO Gabriele Antoniazzi says that not everyone needs such… Read More

More established companies are turning to skunkworks projects — relatively independent teams within large companies — to compete with nimble startups or just generate fresh ideas. One example is Dell’s most recent foray into Linux laptops. Another is Deltek‘s new web service/mobile app Kona, a social task management app that’s taking on Asana and Do.com. Read More

Last month as part of our TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield Coverage, we wrote about Famo.us, the company behind a forthcoming HTML5 framework that its developers claim will make it easier to build HTML5 apps that perform as well as native apps. Now the company is revealing more information about how it works and what it can be used for. Read More